Amy Tan talks about a ‘Joy Luck’ sequel, her mother and five-minute planks

Author Amy Tan’s landmark novel, “The Joy Luck Club,” was published 30 years ago this spring, launching an illustrious career for the Bay Area author who has used her family’s personal history to inform her work.

Which might be why readers have asked Tan if her family members have been outraged over the parts of her fiction drawn from tragic histories about people like her grandmother, a concubine who committed suicide. In the preface of the new anniversary edition of “The Joy Luck Club,” Tan recounts how her mother defended Tan’s work.

“She can tell people what my mother suffered — a stain she could not rub off her back. She can tell the world. That’s how she can change it.”

The Chronicle recently spoke with the 67-year-old author by phone, in a conversation that went deeper into Tan’s relationship with her mother as well as touching on the writer’s battle with Lyme disease and why she started planking, an exercise like a push-up that is held for an extended period.

Q: In “The Opposite of Fate,” you write about your trip to Hawaii when you learned your mother had fallen ill. You vowed that if she recovered that you would ask her to tell you her stories. Can you share more about what happened?

A: I went to the store with friends, and when I came back, I had a message on the answering machine from my brother — my mother had a major heart attack and was in intensive care. All of a sudden I realized she might be dead. I had grown up with all these misunderstandings. We were getting along OK, but mostly because we avoided each other. I made a promise going to the phone that I’d listen to her stories, which she’d already told me a thousand times, and just get to know her. I even threw in a bonus: I’d take her to China, and we could see it together. She could tell me about China, where all her stories are based.

I got to the phone … and suddenly I heard her voice. I was so relieved. She was so happy I was worried. All you have to do to make a mother happy is to say how worried you were. They worried over us all our lives, and then we get to worry about them. You get a little superstitious. If I hadn’t said this thing about getting to know my mother, maybe she wouldn’t have been alive. I had to honor this promise I’d made in the parking lot to take her to China. Take me to China. We started making plans, and I started to ask her to tell me stories. This time I really listened and asked. “How did that make you feel? Why couldn’t you leave?” “What did you eat there? How did you cook it?” All the fine details that you had to have to really be there and live that life with her.

What I realized later on was she wanted a witness. She’d come to America, and nobody knew about her past, because she kept it secret. And now I would listen with great interest, as if I had been there.

A lot of this took place over the phone. I typed very quickly, and was writing this down unedited on my computer, as she talked. I captured a lot of the way she says things, those little expressions when she was talking about how angry she was, her disbelief. She always called her first husband “that bad man.” I really was absorbing that. When I was writing a particular story, I would go to some of the interviews and choose elements. There were times I put down almost exactly what she said.

Amy Tan in her Sausalito garden in 2017. A promise to her mother led to the “Joy Luck Club.” Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle 2017

Q: You’re a longtime supporter of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, a writing conference held each summer. How has that conference been important to you, in your development as a writer?

A: Squaw Valley was the first writers’ conference I’d ever been to. Because of my desperation to find something meaningful in life, I went there in 1985. When I got my critique from (author and Stanford Professor) Elizabeth Tallent, it was like being plugged into an electrical socket. It was so exhilarating. I could see things, what was in the writing, and I knew what questions to ask now.

What’s important to tell people now is that nobody said, “Your manuscript is great, I love the way you wrote this. The insights are terrific, all you need to do is polish it.” Molly Giles looked at (a story). She said, “This is the beginning of twelve stories. It’s really inconsistent, it begins this way, then there’s this voice and that voice. Why should we care about this?” She started circling things. “Why not choose something here? Here’s the beginning. Just write that story.”

So I did. It was the first line, “My mother taught me the art of invisible strength.” I chose the chess player, and I started writing. (While writing) I had my first what I call the “free zone of realization” or I suppose you’d call it the epiphany. Every writer I know will tell you, there’s something that happens with every story — something breaks open in you, and you have this tremendous elation. It’s the greatest feeling of all time, and you hope you get that again. At the point it broke in the story, I was so taken aback, I started crying.

Q: When I was in the sixth grade, I vividly remember reading your essay “Fish Cheeks” in Seventeen magazine. It was the first time I’d seen anything about a Chinese American teenager in a mainstream publication. That piece and stories from “The Joy Luck Club” are widely taught in high school reading curricula. How do you feel, knowing that your work has helped make readers and writers feel seen?

A: What has happened after the publication of the book — whenever people say, “It’s opened doors, encouraged people” — it’s absolutely terrific, but I can’t take credit for it. I was writing for myself. If you didn’t have the intention, and you just happened to throw a ball over a fence, and it turned out it was someone’s long-lost ball, you can’t get credit for that. You were just throwing a ball.

It made me think about the effect of fiction on people. People always say, “Well, it’s just lies, it’s just made up.” Or they think it’s autobiographical, “She played chess,” which I didn’t. That’s not important. What is more interesting to me, what is autobiographical is the emotion that you get in reading the story. Readers get to that point, and they say “That’s me, or there’s a version of me in there and I’m going to write my own stories.”

I have had a number of people say to me that they and their mother read this book together when their mother was dying, and that was the last thing they did together. That is so incredibly touching. I’m grateful. It wasn’t through my intention, but this book, in the hands of readers, gets overlaid with their own experiences and emotions, and it becomes their book.

Q: My freshman year in college, my dorm went to see “The Joy Luck Club” movie together. We all cried.

A: The only person I know who didn’t cry was my mother. I thought she was going to fall apart because there’s a scene in which the girl is watching her mother die. My mother watched her mother die of an opium overdose. A suicide. Whenever she tells the story, she cries. We’re at the premiere, and I’m looking over sideways at her and she’s sitting very straight. Afterwards, I said, “You didn’t get upset. You didn’t cry. She said, “Oh, no — in China, everything so much worse.” That’s a perspective for you, how bad her life was.

Q: It was a success, fostering the hope that it would help open doors for more movies about Asian Americans. Yet we had to wait another 25 years for “Crazy Rich Asians” to come out.

A: You’re right, it took a really long time before another feature film came out with characters in the United States by a writer in the United States. The difference between what happened then and what’s happening now — it’s money, it’s money, and it has to make a ton of money at the box office. “The Joy Luck Club” did really well. We earned whatever it cost, but it didn’t make $100 million. “Crazy Rich Asians” probably did make back whatever it cost (Editor’s note: it made $238.5 million worldwide, against a production budget of $30 million.)

I loved “Crazy Rich Asians” and laughed like crazy! It’s over the top, but that’s the point, it’s meant to be funny. The part that is true — that doesn’t matter what your income is — is introducing your girlfriend or boyfriend to your parents, and their reaction, and how much you will endure for that love.

Q: With more movies, shows and books out by and about Asian American authors, does it lessen the burden of representation that gets set when something is the first of its kind?

A: The number of books that have appeared over time provides almost a historical perspective. People can say this (“The Joy Luck Club”) takes place in World War II, but not everyone’s mother went through World War II. They see now there are other books, and they take place in current times or recent times. The quantity is going to ease the notion that a particular art form has the burden of representation for a large demographic.

The Asian cast in the 1993 film “The Joy Luck Club” was a breakthrough at the time. Photo: Hollywood Pictures

Q: Ron Bass (who co-wrote the “The Joy Luck Club screenplay with Tan) has said you two have rights to the sequel. Can you give us a hint of what’s in it?

A: It would have all the mothers and daughters from the original film, and they would have Millennial daughters. It’s about who they are, their relationships and what their lives are like. Their lives are certainly different from that which the current mothers faced when they were in their 30s. The group of mothers who are now grandmothers have changed as well. You think of what has happened in the world today for older people, and you apply that to some of the characters.

We’re not doing some pastiche based on current events, but looking very realistically at the characters and their desire for a closer relationship and how that would infuse their situation. The people who have looked at the script really like it, so we’ll see. We’re on our way, we’re in the car. We have a map but whether we’re going to make it — that’s the question. Are we going to hit traffic? Is the road closed?

Q: You draw as well as write, sketching animals in your nature journal. Do both creative practices complement each other, and in what way?

A: I started this after the (2016 presidential) election. I was so distraught, everything seemed ugly in the world, and I needed to find beauty again. I had always loved being in nature, so I thought, I’m going to start drawing again. That was my meditation, what soothed me.

I wanted to be an artist when I was growing up; I never thought of becoming a writer. When I did drawings as a kid, they had stories with them. I’d draw, and I’d make stories up. It happened simultaneously. When I’m drawing now, I am inhabiting that animal, being that animal. At every point, you’re forced to pay attention to every single detail. I draw hairs. That’s fun, keeping my brain fully occupied. Drawing, you find in artists, increases white matter. In doing an activity like this, it’s adding to my brain in certain areas.

The experience of trying to create a visual image is what I try to do in stories — and drawing enhances my ability to do that. I used to like to draw people when I was a kid, but what intrigues me now is animals. People are very fussy. If their nose is slightly wider, they’re really dissatisfied. Whereas birds— they don’t care.

Q: You’ve written about your battle with late-stage Lyme disease, which you contracted in 1999. Can you talk about the impact on your writing and your outlook on life and your routine? On Twitter a couple months ago, you posted a photo of yourself reading and planking, and mentioned how you’re trying to get to five minutes in that position.

A: The best thing that came out of the illness is that I have great sympathy now for people with chronic unknown illnesses. They’re sometimes losing the fabric of their lives: relationships, homes, work. During the period when Lyme went into my brain and affected me, it gave me constant anxiety and now I know what it’s like to not be able to get rid of that. It has nothing to do with logic.

The other thing is, I so much appreciate the different parts of my brain, based on knowing what it sometimes won’t do. I find it fascinating. I know that I have to take good care of my health, and despite having a chronic illness, I can be healthy. It’s just a different definition of healthy. I was vegetarian pescatarian, and I just turned vegan. I go to the gym five days a week — body training, Zumba — and I hike. Planking used to be very unpleasant. I’d do it for a minute.

You know in a movie, there’s a bomb with a timer somewhere, and suddenly they see the timer, and they run over and there’s a minute to defuse it or the world’s destroyed? That minute goes on for 10 minutes in a movie. One minute of plank feels like 10 minutes.

I ended up putting on a podcast, and I also discovered audiobooks. Those are good for taking my mind off of things for 3½ minutes. A friend of mine who has cancer, we were talking about our endurance and our health, what we’ve been through, and he said: “Five-minute plank.” I said, “What, you’re crazy!” Then I thought, he has to endure cancer. Enduring a five-minute plank … maybe I won’t make it right away, but I have the rest of my life to keep trying. If you say you can’t do it, you won’t. I have to endure it, to keep my mind focused on the fact that it’s possible. I never dreamed of getting published. I was realistic. I was practical. If you’re lucky, you’ll publish a story in 20 years. You have to be committed to doing it, no matter what. If you don’t get into a magazine or get a publisher, you keep writing. You have to keep going, just like with the plank.